


'til i hold thee in my arms

by meritmut



Series: though we cannot see the dawn [2]
Category: War Horse (2011)
Genre: Alternate Canon, F/M, Romance, for Emily again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-08
Updated: 2012-10-08
Packaged: 2017-11-15 22:36:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/532535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This one is set before James leaves his hometown, and it's his last night with his sweetheart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	'til i hold thee in my arms

It’s a talent he’s concealed from her thus far, that he rows - that down by the river he keeps a small boat, a remnant from his childhood when he and his brother would paddle out into the still water, still attached to the jetty by a long rope but for all intents and purposes drifting free on the current.

She wonders if he would ever have told her this if tonight hadn’t been…well, tonight, and if tomorrow wasn’t tomorrow. But it _is_ tonight, no ordinary night, and so she will never know if things might’ve been different. She lifts her face to the sky as they walk and tastes the sweetness on the air, watches the last of the summertime swallows wheeling and diving above them. The evening feels heavy, somehow compressed with the sudden need to spend every waking second in one another’s company because tomorrow afternoon he will leave her, perhaps forever, and so for the past few days they’ve kept their mutual promise to act as if they were living through the last hours of the world itself. A shrunken world, clinging to her fingertips when she brushes them through his hair and bitter upon his lips when he kisses her yielding mouth, but a world they can call their own.

And if it is their world, then its ending is theirs to suffer through. The sunset and the apocalypse are their parting gifts to each other - an inexorable, inescapable finality, a Ragnarök unseen by all but the two of them.

He won’t entertain those thoughts tonight, though. And if he can keep them from her mind a few hours longer, he may depart in the morning a little happier for the separation.

James calls on her when the town clock chimes six and the setting sun hangs above the trees like a soft-hued lantern, its colour deepening as they walk down to the river. There’s barely a breeze in the warm evening but still the water faintly rustles as it passes them by, and for a moment he pauses to simply stand and watch each dancing flicker of silver light as the swelling sun glimmers upon the river. They’re mirrored there, the two of them, she with her dark hair spilling red as flame across her shoulders and he a figure of near-golden pallor, all fair hair and blue-grey eyes. When he takes her hand, draws her close to him and traces her silken hairline with his tender fingertips, the guileless sweetness in those eyes steals her breath away.

“Come home, James,” she murmurs against his mouth, pressing a gentle kiss to his seeking lips and throwing her arms around his neck before he can return it. She always calls him James, never Jim. Only ever James. She shivers delicately against him as he kisses the curve of her throat, resting there in the scented hollow of soft skin as his arms wind around her waist and he holds her. For all he is the one leaving, she thinks that he’s become an anchor and without him she’ll simply freefall, and never stop until she hits the moon and crumbles into dust with his name inscribed upon her core.

He places kiss after soothing kiss upon her mouth, lets his hands fall to her hips and before these damned tears can escape his eyes - or hers, he sees them sparkling there like the first stars up in the inky gloaming, glistening pinpoints of sorrow hooking him in and drawing him close against her undulating curves - he’s humming a melody, a love song to chase away the knowledge that tomorrow is a day of reckoning, and so is the day after that, and the day after that, and all the weeks to come until he next sees her fair face.

Her grey eyes soften and she rests her head against his chest, fingers knotting and curling over his collar as if she might make herself part of the fabric’s weave and bear herself across his shoulders like a shield. James encloses her in his embrace and they begin to sway there on the banks of the river, borne along in the moment by the tune he hums. The boat bobs on the glassy water, abandoned.

His knuckles curve about her hip and his rough fingertips press close through the thin skirt; his voice lifts lightly into the summer air and for a fleeting capsule of an instant they aren’t the lovers soon to be torn apart by war, merely two shadows flickering between worlds - two wisps of interwoven memory that will go their separate ways and yet carry the other with them from the moment their slick skin parts beneath the moonlight, to the moment such a memory is no longer needed to survive.

**Author's Note:**

> I've been commanded to write a third part, so hopefully it won't end on a low note...


End file.
